LEO Award Winner - Rob Kling
			Rob Kling Rob Kling was Professor of Information Systems and Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Director of the Indiana Univer¬sity Center for Social Infor¬matics. He was born in August 1944 and passed away un¬expectedly at 58 years of age on May 15, 2003, in Bloomington, Indiana. He was a visionary and institution builder who tirelessly promoted a new area of research, Social Infor¬matics, the inter¬disci¬plinary study of the design, uses, and conse¬quences of infor¬mation and com¬munication tech¬nologies. Rob was a brilliant scholar and prolific writer, and his scholarly accomplishments were legion. He was a valued mentor, educator, contributor to public policy, a member of national and international editorial and advisory boards, an organizer of national and international professional societies and conferences, and Editor-in-Chief of The Information Society. In addition to his teaching, he also directed the SLIS Master of Information Science (MIS) Degree Program and oversaw program planning and student recruitment. Rob completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University (B.S., 1965) and his graduate studies, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford University (M.S., 1967; Ph.D., 1971). After graduate school, he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor from 1971 to1973. He then spent more than two decades, from 1973 to 1996, at the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine, where his interests shifted to studying the role of computers in society, organizations, and public policy. He joined the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington in 1996. He was a research fellow at Harvard University in 1982, a visiting researcher at the Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverabeitung, Bonn, Germany in 1983, and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen School of Business and Economics in 1986 and at the Solvay School of Management at the University of Brussels between 1991 and 1993. Rob spent his career formulating the grounds of a new research speciality that combined insights from computer science engineering, information systems design, and the social sciences. His prodigious corpus of research is an extended exploration of the character of ICTs. Since the early 1970s, he was a leading expert on the study of social informatics, which investigates aspects of computerization, the roles of information technology in social and organizational change, and the ways that the social organization of IT is influenced by social forces and social practices. His research interests were wide-ranging. He studied how intensive computerization transforms work practices and how computerization entails many social choices. He early observed that complex information and expert systems are integrated into the social life of organizations and conducted studies in numerous kinds of environments, including local, state, and national governments, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, law offices, and high-tech manufacturing. He provided us with the conceptual underpinnings that illuminate the complex and contextually embedded nature of socio-technical networks and the interactions between ICTs and social structures that shape how people use technology. His most recent research examined electronic publishing, digital libraries, professional communities, and scientific collaboration. In addition to his scholarly work, he wrote textbooks to introduce students to social informatics and published articles on the challenges of teaching the social uses of computing. He was among the first to recognize the political character of compu¬terization. He wrote extensively about value conflicts and social choices and advocated that social values be incorporated in the design of computer-based information systems and in the computer science, information science, management of information systems, and informatics curriculum. He lobbied for changes in public policy and made the debates about computerization come alive in the classroom. Rob’s contributions were recognized by awards and recognitions. He received the Silver Core Award from the International Federation of Information Processing Societies in1983 and a Professional Service Award from the Association of Computing Machinery in 1984. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels in 1987. He became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001. In 2003, received the Award for Excellence from the Literati Club of Emerald Publishers for his article, “A Critical Professional Education about Information and Communication Technologies and Social Life,”published in the journal Information Technology & People, as well as being named an AIS Fellow. In 2004, he received the Best Paper Award for his coauthored article, “Reconceptualizing Users as Social Actors in Information Systems Research,” published in MIS Quarterly. Most recently, he has been honored by Indiana University with the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics. Rob Kling had a far-reaching impact on the professional worlds of social informatics and information technology. His great legacy is to his colleagues and the generations of students he introduced to social informatics, those whom he inspired, nurtured, mentored, collaborated with, and to whom he communicated his deep engagement with intellectual life and the world and his commitment to an ethical and moral life. We miss him terribly.